Today’s feast always falls between the Solemnity of Christmas and that of Mary Theotokos, i.e., Mary the Mother of God.  This year, since the Nativity falls on a Saturday, this festival follows immediately on the next day, Sunday.  The thematic of the Holy Family is a devotional consequence of the Nativity scene so deeply etched in our Christmas cultural consciousness ever since St. Francis of Assisi made it the enduring seasonal icon it has become.

As we observed last year on this festival, we must avoid one great temptation when reflecting on that famous Holy Family and avoid another when trying to apply their  holiness to our own lives and our own particular holy families (!).  The first temptation is to imagine (wrongly!) that Joseph, Mary and Jesus, precisely because of their holiness, enjoyed lives free from issues and problems which cause anguish, irritation, disharmony and other situations so normal and natural between and among people in domestic relationships.  Today’s Gospel lesson is about safeguarding one’s family from the threat of violence, hatred and poverty.  While somewhat foreign to us in many safe neighborhoods, the danger of violence is common for huge portions of the world’s population even in the 21^st Christian Century, both in the USA and other developed nations, as well as in those less-blessed nations and regions as well.  If you live in relative peace and security, then you have cause to be tremendously thankful to God for your blessed circumstances.  Jesus, Mary and Joseph had all the burdensome challenges of life normal for their time and place.

A second temptation is to irrationally expect just such a mistakenly-imagined domestic bliss for your own family household.  Real life always was, is now, and ever shall be, difficult and messy, complex and exhausting.  In spite of all Christian hope, any Gospel lessons perceived, and even with all the material advantages imaginable, real people get into complicated and very difficult human situations.  Joseph, Mary and Jesus were real people in their era just as you are real in yours.  It is important for believers in every time and place to live effectively, wisely, lovingly and sensibly in the midst of life’s ubiquitous messiness.  Your family is also essentially a holy family because of at least one believer active within it, you!  And in spite of all your individual and collective strengths and weaknesses, virtues and sins, wealth and poverty – you are where you are at least in great part because you have loved those who are yours.  So . . . keep loving, and thinking, and working, and praying and believing!

The passage from Sirach is a succinct, idealized description of how a 2^nd Century BC Jewish family was expected to operate.  The book was written as advice from a very religious Jewish father to his very religious adult, married son.  It defined and described a family ideal in ancient Jewish patriarchal cultural terms.  Today, though, the very definition of family is infinitely more plastic and adjustable: imagine all the shapes in which families are found.  We can today very accurately and reasonably assert, for example, that “God sets a mother in honor over her children...” Realistically, the members of each and every household define themselves as family in their own practical terms.  No person, institution, government or ethnicity, can morally impose a particular style or definition upon a family of any shape or description.  Familial situations evolve in spite of our hopes and intentions.  They are complex and demand lots of effort.  All modern Christian families, of whatever configuration, are essentially holy in the sense of being affectionately engaged with loving wisdom, compassion and humor, reverence and respect, aware of all human limitations and abilities.  Holiness brings a willingness to sit with, hold on to, and lovingly engage each other in spite of the complications that life brings.

The long form of the second reading from the letter to the Colossians has two distinct parts to it.  The first part is an uplifting literary tapestry of the virtues metaphorically “worn” by Christians, bonded by love, controlled by the believers’ memories of Christ’s peace, and, of course, the all important Christian gratitude.  This is a profoundly simple description of how all Christian relationships ought to be engaged.

The second part of the reading, sadly omitted by using the shorter option, is a prophetic exhortation about domestic life in the 1^st Christian Century.  We must pay serious attention to it because is has often been used in unnuanced, out-of-context, and destructive ways by homilists, teachers and religious moralists.  Addressed to wives, husbands, adult children, and fathers, it encourages them to embrace and engage that tapestry of virtue described just before it and to do so in the ways culturally accepted in Paul’s day.  The Greek verb, translated as “be submissive” and addressed to the wives, presumed a culturally mature and healthy love and respect between spouses.  That Christian husbands were exhorted to love their wives insinuates that husbandly love was not always culturally presumed, expected, or experienced as has come to be expected in our 21^st Christian Century American culture.  In Gospel terms such love came to be hoped for in the relationship, but 1^st Century marriage was culturally a power relationship as much as a romantic relationship.  This text is certainly not a statement to us today of the husband’s superiority over his wife.  Neither is it an instruction to us moderns to accept or condone abusive treatment, or disrespectful behavior of any sort, or in any amount.  To read it as such is to overlook that ancient and modern cultural behaviors are often radically different from each other.  To impose ancient marriage advice, standards or customs on modern marriage realities is often destructive, unhealthy, and anti-Gospel.  Remember, “Culture incarnates the Gospel message while the Gospel message critiques each culture.”  And cultures are radically different in different eras and areas.  So, we, today’s Gospel believers, must conscientiously work to reform and revise destructive behaviors in every host culture (for the Gospel) into something ever-more humane, holy and healthy.  Our cultural evolution of equality and respect between the genders is an example of how the Gospel message has helped (!) critique and has helped to bring about cultural change for the better.  Homilists who use these verses (as they ought) must invoke culturally sensitive good sense, and be well-researched and effective advocates of healthy modern relational dynamics.  Practices of ancient or foreign cultures must not be accepted merely because they are found in the ancient and inspired texts which we use today (remember that slavery was assumed to be good in sacred scripture).  Homilists, teachers and others in authority who misuse biblical texts to oppress, abuse or manipulate persons, or to perpetuate, rationalize or approve of abuse or oppression, are themselves guilty of serious foolishness, destructiveness and meanness.  They have much for which to answer in the cause of human dignity, justice and peace, not to mention in the evolution and practice of the Sacrament of Marriage.

Today’s Gospel anecdote, popularly known as the Flight into Egypt, is a New Testament theological and literary parallel to the Old Testament’s migration of the Israelites into Egypt set during a great famine in the final chapters of the Book of Genesis.  That lengthy story about the 12 patriarchal brothers includes some wonderful family humor as well as profound domestic abuse and mischief.  Hearts break, arguments are engaged, tempers flare, traps are laid . . . just like in modern families.  The story resolves as the Israelites arrive in Egypt and are saved from the devastation of famine by their estranged brother, Joseph, who formerly had been sold into slavery by his jealous brothers.  The story of the Israelites’ departure from Egypt begins in the Book of Exodus when the Egyptian situation of the Israelites centuries later has changed drastically and tragically.  One of their own, Moses, arises to “save them” from the recently developed reality of slavery and abuse.  Matthew’s Gospel narrative’s angelically launched urgent escape to Egypt by Joseph and his wife and child places them in Egyptian safety, out of reach from the violent sociopath, King Herod (“the Great!”).  Upon Herod’s death (in the year 4 BC by our calendar), the angel again directed Joseph, this time to bring his family back to live among God’s Chosen People in the Holy Land.  Paralleling Moses as savior in Exodus, a new savior has literally come out of Egypt for God’s People.  Just as the Patriarch Joseph gave his extended family refuge in Egypt, so did Joseph, Mary’s husband, provide refuge for his family in Egypt.  Just as Moses saved his people from an evil king, so Jesus saved his people from the evil realities of his day.

Beware of the temptation to romanticize the story of the flight to and from Egypt.  This is part of the Salvation Story, the on-going, dynamic presence of God among us!  May your comings and goings in these holy seasons be filled with good deeds and peace, and keep you and yours safe from every danger!

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